[image error]Synaesthesia seems to everyone to be weird. But I got to thinking about it, and wondered if it really is. For those of you who don’t know what it is, I’ll explain it this way: The mixing of senses. You can hear the food you taste, see the colours of music, taste it, and feel sound. This strange gift, discovered over 100 years ago, was determined to be neural in basis. And, nothing has changed, until recently with the advent of the MRI.

Here’s the science: Those who have an auditory response to a visual stimuli may be telling researchers it has nothing to do with a neural basis, raising fundamental questions about how the brain integrates information from multiple senses. What it suggests is there exists a cross activation of the senses across the cortical regions of the brain. Numerous brain areas are well-known to be involved in audio-visual integration, and has included regions of the parietal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus. In a recent magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, audio-visual stimuli increased the activity of the superior temporal sulcus, showing that there were multi-sensory interactions. In short, the mixing of senses more…